Religion

  • You Don’t Need Fixed

    You Don’t Need Fixed

    I grew up in a time when you could turn on the news and hear people tell you, plainly, that if you were an LGBTQ+ young person, something about you was wrong. Not misunderstood. Not still figuring it out. Wrong. And it wasn’t quiet. It was said out loud, in living rooms, on television, in…

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  • Crazy

    Crazy

    Crazy will always be one of my favorite books I’ve written. First of all, how it was written is different than anything else I have ever done. In 2006, I was personally asked to come to an old truck stop restaurant on Old Route 66. The Tri County Truck Stop in Villa Ridge, Missouri. They…

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  • Twenty Years Later

    Twenty Years Later

    “He turns; I can see his frontal torso in the light. It’s covered in blood. Is he looking at me? The room begins to spin. The sound of his desperation matches the tempo of his hands scrubbing his body. The room keeps spinning and spinning. I still feel his eyes on me. I can’t breathe.…

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  • A Haunting Disease

    A Haunting Disease

    I heard a quote once that described a haunted house as one that had gone insane. That made a strange kind of sense to me. The idea that a house could harbor something hidden inside it, a kind of internal system that carries something through its walls and floors like a disease. That is what…

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  • Thirty Eight Seconds

    Thirty Eight Seconds

    I don’t talk about this very often. It’s not because I’m trying to keep it private. It’s just one of those things that doesn’t come up in normal conversation, and honestly, I’ve never felt the need to turn it into something bigger than what it was. I was on the operating table when I died.…

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  • 25 Years

    25 Years

    Twenty five years ago I stepped into a haunted house. Back then it was just my home. My family and I were living there and trying to figure out what was happening around us. Those were frightening months. Anyone who has lived through something like that knows how it gets into your head. Even when…

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  • Bookends

    Bookends

    Every once in a while I stop and look at two books sitting on my shelf. The Uninvited and The Architecture of Shadows. They were written many years apart, but in a strange way they belong to the same story. The Uninvited was the beginning of everything for me. It tells the story of what…

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  • Apocalypse, Again

    Apocalypse, Again

    Lately I have been seeing more and more people say the same thing. That everything happening in the world right now was predicted in the Bible. Wars. Political tension. Disasters. Social division. For many people it feels like history is building toward something final, something foretold long ago. I understand why people feel that way.…

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  • Neighbors, Not Enemies

    Neighbors, Not Enemies

    You know what has been bothering me lately about the state of things in the United States? How much of what we are living through feels rooted in hating your neighbor. Not debating policy. Not wrestling with ideas. Not even arguing about the direction of the country. It feels personal now. It feels aimed at…

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  • Recognition

    Recognition

    I want to start this quietly, because this is not a reaction piece. It is me trying to place a current moment inside a much longer human story. When Donald Trump hosted a prayer breakfast, stood in front of cameras talking about faith and values, and then later that same night shared a racist video…

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